Transcripts of Failure

VICTOR SEBESTYEN – The New York Times

Copyright The New York Times
THE highly decorated general sat opposite his commander in chief and explained the problems his army faced fighting in the hills around Kabul: â€šÃ„ÃºThere is no piece of land in Afghanistan that has not been occupied by one of our soldiers at some time or another,â€šÃ„Ã¹ he said. â€šÃ„ÃºNevertheless much of the territory stays in the hands of the terrorists. We control the provincial centers, but we cannot maintain political control over the territory we seize.
â€šÃ„ÃºOur soldiers are not to blame. Theyâ€šÃ„Ã´ve fought incredibly bravely in adverse conditions. But to occupy towns and villages temporarily has little value in such a vast land where the insurgents can just disappear into the hills.â€šÃ„Ã¹ He went on to request extra troops and equipment. â€šÃ„ÃºWithout them, without a lot more men, this war will continue for a very, very long time,â€šÃ„Ã¹ he said.
These sound as if they could be the words of Lt. Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top American commander in Afghanistan, to President Obama in recent days or weeks. In fact, they were spoken by Sergei Akhromeyev, the commander of the Soviet armed forces, to the Soviet Unionâ€šÃ„Ã´s Politburo on Nov. 13, 1986.
Soviet forces were then in the seventh year of their nine-year-long Afghan conflict, and Marshal Akhromeyev, a hero of the Leningrad siege in World War II, was trying to explain why a force of nearly 110,000 well-equipped soldiers from one of the worldâ€šÃ„Ã´s two superpowers was appearing to be humiliated by bands of â€šÃ„Ãºterrorists,â€šÃ„Ã¹ as the Soviets often called the mujahideen.
The minutes of Akhromeyevâ€šÃ„Ã´s meeting with the Politburo were recently unearthed by American and Russian scholars of the cold war â€šÃ„Ã® these and other materials substantially expand our knowledge of the Soviet Unionâ€šÃ„Ã´s disastrous campaign. As President Obama contemplates Americaâ€šÃ„Ã´s own future in Afghanistan, he would be well advised to read some of these revealing Politburo papers; he might also pick up a few riveting memoirs of Soviet generals who fought there. These sources show as many similarities between the two wars as differences â€šÃ„Ã® and may provide the administration with some valuable counsel.
Much of the fighting during the Soviet war in Afghanistan was in places that have grown familiar to us now, like Kandahar and Helmand Provinces. The Sovietsâ€šÃ„Ã´ main base of operations was Bagram, which is now the United States Army headquarters. Over the years, the Soviets changed their tactics frequently, but much of the time they were trying and failing to pacify the countryâ€šÃ„Ã´s problematic south and east, often conducting armed sweeps along the border with Pakistan, through which many of the guerrillas moved, as the Taliban do now.
That war was characterized by disputes between soldiers and politicians. As Russian documents show, the politicians ordered the invasion against the advice of the armed forces. The chief of the Soviet Defense Staff, Marshal Nikolai Ogarkov, raised doubts shortly before Soviet forces were dispatched on Christmas Day 1979. He told Dmitri Ustinov â€šÃ„Ã® the long-serving defense minister who had been a favorite of Stalin â€šÃ„Ã® that experience from the British and czarist armies in the 19th century should encourage caution. Ustinov replied: â€šÃ„ÃºAre the generals now making policy in the Soviet Union? Your job is to plan specific operations and carry them out … . Shut up and obey orders.â€šÃ„Ã¹
Ogarkov went further up the chain of command to the Communist Party boss, Leonid Brezhnev. He warned that an invasion â€šÃ„Ãºcould mire us in unfamiliar, difficult conditions and would align the entire Islamic East against us.â€šÃ„Ã¹ He was cut off mid-sentence: â€šÃ„ÃºFocus on military matters,â€šÃ„Ã¹ Brezhnev ordered. â€šÃ„ÃºLeave the policymaking to us.â€šÃ„Ã¹
The Soviet leaders realized they had blundered soon after the invasion. Originally, the mission was simply to support the Communist government â€šÃ„Ã® the result of a coup Moscow had initially tried to prevent, and then had no choice but to back â€šÃ„Ã® and then get out within a few months. But the mujahideenâ€šÃ„Ã´s jihad against the godless Communists had enormous popular support within the country, and from outside. Money and sophisticated weapons poured in from America and Saudi Arabia, through Pakistan.Click to read more